The Making of the Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World
The Making of the Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World
Reviewed by Caroline Stone on November 15, 2019
This beautiful book discusses, as its title suggests, the creation of the remarkable gallery that opened in 2018 in the British Museum. It is not a record of the new gallery’s art collection itself, although there are splendid photographs of a small selection of the exhibits. The book contains sections about the scope of the Malaysia-based Albukhary Foundation of the Islamic World, which financed the gallery, and how the British Museum built up the extensive collection of Islamic art that is represented in it. But above all the book describes the complex process of designing and building the gallery using, on the one hand, traditional Islamic crafts and, on the other, the most up-to-date technology to provide the best-possible interactive environment to explore this stunning presentation of the history of Islamic art over some 1,400 years across Asia and Africa.